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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27909532">The Dead Space Between the Stars</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/auxbloood/pseuds/auxbloood'>auxbloood</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Fix-It of Sorts, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Ghost(s), Implied/Referenced Character Death, Kylo Ren Redemption, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pilot Poe Dameron, Slow Burn, Soul-Searching, Time Skips, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, Young Poe Dameron</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 18:47:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,426</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27909532</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/auxbloood/pseuds/auxbloood</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The man who is nothing, and yet everything to himself, lies against the black. He's spinning in the sleepless void. He tries hard to remember who he is; the ghost had told him it was the most important thing, after all.</p><p>But why can't he recall anything? Not his name, not his face. . . nothing. Only darkness.</p><p>And why does it feel like the fate of the universe depends on him?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Poe Dameron/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Back.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He's falling.</p><p>He's <em>failing</em>.</p><p>Somewhere in the deepest recesses of his mind he registers the burn at his gut, the sweep of the blade, and the dull hum of the lightsaber as it renders through him. Some part of his mind must realize the knife that followed - silver, glinting, pulled from some clandestine part of a golden robe, but everything is pooling together. The motions are so far back in his consciousness the moment they happen that he doesn't really notice that in the blink of an eye, he's nearly been made into two.</p><p>This isn't. . . right.</p><p>This isn't how things were supposed to <em>be</em>.</p><p>He thinks he can still see, but he isn't really sure, because everything is blurring together around him. He can vaguely register the outline of Rey, swinging wildly, untrained, untethered just like always, but he thinks he also somehow sees. . . his mother? That's not right. She can't be there. She's never there for this because she's a thousand by a thousand miles away. That couldn't possibly be her smiling down at him, all blue and transparent and ethereal while he falls backwards, and sideways all the same.</p><p>Sparks.</p><p>There's sparks on the other side of the grand chamber.</p><p>And some of them are simply dancing across his eyes. But most of them are from the blade the girl carries, carving deep, and low and slow across the obsidian floor. The ones that come from within him seem to be coming from so very far away - like a distant stream of stars, cascading across the plane of his gaze as he slips further back into the great beyond. Blinding light at the margins of his vision.</p><p><em>None</em> of this makes sense.</p><p>He can't. . . he can't understand what's <em>happening</em>.</p><p>"Ben!"</p><p>Things stop reeling backwards and he feels still now, all of a sudden. Is he cold? Is he warm? He doesn't even know if he remembers the meaning of those words, though they keep flashing in his mind. A thousand different things are. It's a syllabic supernova. Nonsense things. A last gasp to grasp the reality before him.</p><p>Most of them mean nothing as he lies ever so still; some may be important, but he really isn't sure of much of anything anymore.</p><p>
  <em>'Im-por-tant.'</em>
</p><p>
  <em>'Impo-r-ta-nt.'</em>
</p><p>How do you say that word? The man tries to open his mouth, but it's stuck like glue. His tongue won't work. His jaw won't open. It's trying to do something, but he doesn't feel anything anymore, and he thinks there's supposed to be sounds coming from him but he doesn't really hear them. Things are starting to get black now as well, the bursting bits of light from before start meeting a wave of nothing that's slowly welling up from within him.</p><p>And there's so much red in between.</p><p>Between his mouth.</p><p>Under his chin.</p><p>His stomach, and his hands, and the black tiled floor.</p><p>There's too much red.</p><p>There's too much of <em>everything.</em></p><p>
  <em>. . .</em>
</p><p>And there's not enough of him left to care.</p><p>A thought crosses him.</p><p>He knows he failed, but he can't remember at <em>what</em>. There's something there, trying to claw its way back towards the surface, desperate, screaming, but falling back into him as he goes more blurry still. A slow ocean creeps out from beneath him slowly while he waits to remember what was so crucial from before, but he can't stop staring at the marching line of the crimson pool. He can't think of the word for it anymore, but it's dark, and it's red, and it looks like it's <em>'bad'</em> but he isn't sure.</p><p>The man can't feel anything anymore now, though he suspects he should be feeling quite a bit.</p><p>Maybe it's not so terrible, then. Or maybe it is.</p><p>What is anything anymore, but the blanket of stars that he feels pressing down on him?</p><p>. . .</p><p>The colors are so big now, in every part of him, against that brilliant tide.</p><p>They're so large.</p><p>Cosmic.</p><p>Bright.</p><p>. . .</p><p>He feels so small beneath them.</p><p>. . .</p><p>The last thing he does is look over to the right.</p><p>Someone's falling over there, too.</p><p>Maybe she can see the stars.</p><p>. . .</p><p>He floats up, and away, as he goes, on, and on, and on, and away and away from here - beyond everything, and anything, and into the dead space between the stars.</p>
<hr/><p>He thinks that it's weird that he can feel again.</p><p>Along with the fact that it's odd he can even recognize the feeling.</p><p>That he knows <em>anything</em>, really.</p><p>The words that he couldn't grasp before feel acrid on his tongue, and in the knowhere that must be somewhere, he tries to roll them out on his tongue.</p><p>
  <em>(B-. . .b. . .)</em>
</p><p>But nothing comes out. Instead, vague murmurs dance in his head, and his lips refuse to move.</p><p>The word refuses to finish. It's missing half it's parts.</p><p>That's not right. It doesn't feel <em>right</em>. There <em>must</em> be something else.</p><p>Some sound with a <em>K</em> and an <em>E</em> and a <em>Y</em> in between. The letters tessellate across the nothing around him, and even though he can hear how they're supposed to be, he doesn't know what the sound really means. It doesn't make any sense.</p><p>None of this does.</p><p>Where. . . where is he? Where is the girl he remembers from before. Where is. . .</p><p>
  <em>(S-. . .snow. . snoeke.)</em>
</p><p>
  <em>(<strong>Snoke.</strong>)</em>
</p><p>That seems ok. When it splays in his head, his mind knows that's correct. And his body reacts viscerally to the sound, clenching, and unclenching, and for some reason reaching towards his gut, so it must mean something. Something big. Something bad. Unwanted.</p><p>Images, then.</p><p>They're so fast before him, like he's watching a holo-tape at light-speed. It's him, he thinks. He's got a <em>[lightsaber]</em> the nothing whispers to him, and he's striking hard, and fast, and true towards a decrepit man in a gold cloak. The man who is him, and not him seems so angry, so belligerent, so sure of himself while he swings.</p><p>And then he isn't.</p><p>A flash of red bursts into him.</p><p>And then there's a flitting flash of steel.</p><p>And then he's falling again.</p><p>His hand goes to his stomach where the lightsaber struck the man he sees, and he feels nothing but taught skin over bone. He's one solid piece, and his tunic looks new, but as the other 'him' had clearly been torn in two.</p><p>The scene plays on.</p><p>"---!"</p><p>The sound is muted. Stifled. Stagnant and intangible.</p><p>Why can't he hear some things, but not others?</p><p>He sees the girl on the far side of the room.</p><p>She shouts the same thing as before, and he watches the way her lips form the words when they move. </p><p>"B--!"</p><p>The same word from before. He tries it on his tongue again, and just like before, nothing comes out. The man clenches his fist. Everything is wrong. For some reason, the word is starting to seem wrong as well.</p><p>"Because it is."</p><p>Suddenly, there's figure on his right. His head spins round at double-time, and when he finally finds it, he can see it's made of the same light that he vaguely remembers seeing before. The one in the shape of a woman. Who was she again?</p><p>It steps closer to him, not giving him the time to contemplate further.</p><p>"Do you know where you are?"</p><p>The voice reverberates <em>everywhere.</em></p><p>
  <em>('No.')</em>
</p><p>The syllables are in his head, bouncing across the walls of his mind, but they won't come out of him still. He shakes his head instead, hoping the apparition can understand.</p><p>"That's all right. I wouldn't have expected you to."</p><p>The transparent ghost steps closer to him. A man with a long face and a scar. He looks <em>[worn]</em>, the blackness tells him. He looks <em>[worn]</em> and<em> [alone]</em>.</p><p>"Do you know who I am, perhaps?"</p><p>
  <em>('No.')</em>
</p><p>He shakes his head again.</p><p>The spectre laughs, amused for some unfathomable reason, and the halls of the black chasm reverberate with the highs and the lows of the sound as it crescendos into an eternity.</p><p>"Really? Well, isn't that something. You spend years trying to find me, and now that you have, you have no idea who you're looking at." The ghost shakes his head, smile lopsided on the corner of its mouth. "That's typical. The Force likes ironies like that. I'm not really surprised."</p><p>The man doesn't say anything. He still can't, even if he wanted to, which he does. Somewhere within him the word <em>[Force]</em> bubbles up like a fountain, and brings more of the images to him.</p><p>A boy with a toy fighter making it float all on its own. A young man sweating beneath two setting suns while an orb floats around him. The spark and sputter-flash of blaster bolts fired blind. A smile on a boy's lips as his mentor hands him his first lightsaber. A green-lit bedroom, and the smell of fear, while the boy hears something deadly crackle to life behind him in his sleep.</p><p>The terrified look in the eyes of a teacher, who's now lost everything he's ever known.</p><p>A man cloaked in gold.</p><p>A boy, and a girl lying dead near a cold, black throne.</p><p>Failure.</p><p>While he's quiet, watching only what his own eyes can see, the apparition steps closer to him, letting him take his moment because that's all he has now. Time. Eternity.</p><p>When his eyes stop searching the void for answers, the ghost speaks again.</p><p>"I have to say, I don't really know why you're here." The ghost sighs, and sits down on a grey stone bench that the man is so entirely sure wasn't there just a second ago. "In fact, I don't really know where <em>'here'</em> is. I've never seen something like this before. It feels wrong. <em>Lost</em>." The ghost folds his arms under his brown and tan cloak. "Although, I guess you always were."</p><p>
  <em>('I don't even know who I am.')</em>
</p><p>The man doesn't even intend for the specter to hear it, but somehow he does, with a nod of his head.</p><p>"I think that might be the point here," The ghost begins with a whisper, and the sound is so certain that the timbre of his voice runs virulent rivers of ice into him. "I don't think you ever knew who you were. Not before, not really. Not now, either. I think, even in spite of what you tried to do." Suddenly the ghost is standing, and holding onto the man's arm so very gently. When the ghost speaks again, it's intent is so very gentle. "The Force needs you to figure that out I believe, before you can go back."</p><p>
  <em>('Go? Go where?')</em>
</p><p>"Well that I can't tell you. That's for you to decide, here; in between. What you want. Who you are. How things need to be. You need to choose this time. For yourself, and nobody else."</p><p>The ghost looks over his shoulder like there's a voice calling in the distance, but the man only hears the hum and the vibration of the blackness around them. After a moment, the ghost turns back to him, and without saying so, the man understands it's time for the spectre to go.</p><p>
  <em>('Can you at least tell my name?')</em>
</p><p>"No." The man cocks that smirk again, and the smile looks vaguer still while he walks towards where he was looking before. "If you don't even know yourself, who am I to tell you? Who am I to decide?" The ghost walks further on, so ethereal now, barely backlit against the blackness. A knowing smile flashes back before a bright blip, a curt wave, and a "you'll have to figure that on your own, kid."</p><p>
  <em>('Wait.')</em>
</p><p>But the ghost is gone.</p><p>There's nothing around the man now.</p><p>
  <em>('Wait!')</em>
</p><p>There's nothing, and he is alone.</p><p>He doesn't know how much time passes after the ghost leaves. He doesn't know anything still. He feels so very small, and scared, the man concedes, trying to shout, but unable to scream.</p><p>Tears, he realizes, flow unhindered from him, down his face, onto the backs of his pale hands. He sits there on his knees for what could have been an eternity while they coalesce into a river beneath him, and wishes for nothing but a voice - anything, at all - among the dark.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Forward.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Is it decades? Is it centuries?</p><p>The man has no idea.</p><p>Nothing <em>is</em> and nothing <em>isn't</em>, all the same.</p><p>The man who is nothing, and yet everything to himself, lays there, spinning inside of himself, alone in the sleepless void. He tries so very hard to remember who he is; the ghost had told him it was the most important thing, after all.</p><p>But the man feels nothing. No name comes to mind. No purpose but the black, and himself, alone.</p><p>It feels as if something vital has been torn from him. Torn, and thrown out into the aether, where he can't seem to find it again.</p><p>The man had mentioned something before; The Force.</p><p>He was. . . connected, once upon a time. Before the blackness. That much is certain. He knows the Force and the Force knows him. Something within him tells him he's felt that universal pull since he was small and unmade in his mother's womb. So the man decides that it's the best place to start, and he spends eons upon eons upon centuries in an untold number of moments reaching out.</p><p>Time flows, and it's stagnant all the same.</p><p>. . .</p><p>Eventually, a spark.</p><p>The images from before, with the ghost, are joined slowly by others while he makes himself think for a life-age of the universe.</p><p>[The Force.]</p><p>[His Force.]</p><p>The hum of a red blade flashing true under the setting purple sun of some wild and untamed planet. Flames and fire. A fist holding that cadmium thing swinging wild, and true, sundering dense, young flesh. A reprimand for his lack of control. The curve of his spine curling into itself while lightning cascades down his every sinew, and he knows that he's done something disappointing; there's always something wrong for the man who he always sees draped in endless robes of gold.</p><p>The flashes make no sense, really. They're just fragments without true and clear meaning. And yet, while he watches them, he knows with every fiber of his being that he experienced them before. That they were him; a forgotten past. But even when they come, and the man feels the faintest sliver of hope amongst the black, it doesn't get him any closer to truth. That singular truth of who he is. They're still so scattered, all garbled, and thrown together, and crude. He can't piece them together at the end, no matter how hard he tries, and when he screams that voiceless scream, begging for purchase, his mind ripples around him. A thousand fine blades, all inside. Like the finest Corellian glass, they dig wounds into every facet of his being, and refuse to relent.</p><p>He screams while they cut.</p><p>Like always, the man makes no sound.</p><p>The darkness gives nothing in return.</p><p>He has no idea how long it is before he finds the courage to try again.</p><p>When he does, he reaches out. Tries to find that thing he knows is within him; that Force.</p><p>. . . </p><p>He feels nothing in return.</p><p>Only pain.</p><hr/><p>He's always asleep, and awake, all at the same time.</p><p>He can never rest, but every second of every moment is like he's caught in a dream.</p><p>. . .</p><p>No, that's wrong.</p><p>A <em>nightmare</em>.</p><hr/><p>He stops trying to speak after a while. It never works. The only thing left is his ability to feel, and so the man tries to use it. He lifts onto legs that shake, and rock from unused, and he tries to throw his hands out into the blackness and feel along its curves with his fingertips until he finds something that might go into somewhere else. Anywhere else, but the unfathomable limitations of the void. But his hands find no purchase, and the silken bands of the ephemeral give him nothing but black ink, and sky.</p><p>He wanders for what could be decades. </p><p>Or a fraction of a single moment.</p><p>Time, he realizes quickly, has no meaning in this place.</p><p>No meaning at all.</p><p>Even though he'd promised himself he wouldn't try to speak again, he allows himself one more single moment. A fleeting thing, when he opens his mouth, and tries to voice his agony to the cosmos, and begs for anything but 'this.'</p><p>. . .</p><p>He really does stop trying, then.</p><hr/><p>When doing <em>anything</em> never works, he finally decides to become <em>nothing</em>.</p><p>To let nothing within him, and around him all the same.</p><p>He decides to let go, and embrace the cold, and the black, and the stagnant thing he has become.</p><p>He centers himself, and sits cross legged against the floor that isn't really there, and joins his fingertips together at their points.</p><p>He thinks it's called [meditation]; at least, that's what the void tells him all of a sudden when he stills. It's the first time the space has spoken since the visit from the ghost, and it finally seems he's done something right.</p><p>So he tries to shake the overwhelming catharsis of the sliver of hope it gives him, and empties himself again.</p><p>Breathe.</p><p>Breathe.</p><p>Breathe, again.</p><p>. . .</p><p>He feels it.</p><p>Something behind him. And there could have been a voice; he really isn't sure.</p><p>He turns so fast that he sees streaks in his eyes, and when he flies around, there's something there. Indescribably far in the distance. It's dim. Minuscule, really. It pulses like the faintest star, on the most frost laden night one could imagine, stuck behind clouds and cold above. He doesn't think he could reach it if he tried.</p><p>But he still wants to, so he walks.</p><p>As he steps, the echoes of his feet are joined by the sensation that there's sound.</p><p>"---!"</p><p>"---- ---!"</p><p>And yet like before, they're the words that he's forbidden to hear.</p><p>As soon as they come, they're gone again, and the man is alone another time.</p><p>
  <em>('Who's speaking to me? Show yourself.')</em>
</p><p>He tries to extend every molecule within him to probe and prod out, and beyond, but it finds no purchase all the same. The promise of The Force feels like it's a hair's breadth from his fingers, but still so far away.</p><p>This is [agony]. This is [cruel]. This is [desolation].</p><p>The void gives him all the words to describe his [rage].</p><p>. . .</p><p>Something shifts within him.</p><p>It's white. It's white hot and it careens against the blackness, and he sucks the burn of its atmosphere deep into his chest. The man who is nothing rattles, and shakes, and his fists clench until little red streaks splay out in his palms. He's done. He's done with this madness.</p><p>
  <em>('Answer me.')</em>
</p><p>There is no uncertainty in his mind; he demands it.</p><p>
  <em>('Answer me, now.')</em>
</p><p>He tries again. He imagines every part of his will flowing forth like some crude, blue-bright supernova into the beyond, and he knows that this time, THIS TIME, the void is going to answer back.</p><p>
  <em>('Answer me.')</em>
</p><p>[A red sun rages against the back of the stars, in some place beyond time and memory].</p><p>
  <em>('Answer. Me. Now.')</em>
</p><p>[Deep in the farthest corner of the universe, a faint yellow moon waxes and wanes high above a verdant green planet, and the light of a brilliant star flashes vermillion in its path].</p><p>
  <em>(NOW, DAMN YOU!)</em>
</p><p>And everything breaks.</p><p>All at once, the black curtain pulls back from in front of his eyes and he feels himself sliding. The pull is so strong beneath his feet, and he's stretched, and pulled, and falling in every direction at once. The incandescent rage the man exudes subsides in an instant as he careens backwards, forwards, sideways throughout the nothing until he feels upside down into the floor of the world, standing on the precipice of the edge. He feels light and heavy all the same, and before him the blackness parts like a river. It spreads itself a million light-years wide, and it mixes with a milky white between. </p><p>They coalesce.</p><p>He's folded within.</p><p>Grey. Everything before him is now grey.</p><p>It's blinding, really. He wants to shut his eyes against the brilliance, but he's spent so long in the dark, and he's afraid that if he does, it'll disappear.</p><p>The man could cry at the sight.</p><p>The man could weep, after so very long with nothing.</p><p>So he does.</p><p>He bathes in the middling tone - white, black, nothing, everything at once - soaking himself to the bone.</p>
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